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A Partisan Lightning Rod Is Undeterred

Protesters at the Lyndon B. Johnson library in Austin, Tex., before Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke there last week.Credit
Ben Sklar for The New York Times

AUSTIN, Tex. — For nearly three years, Republicans have attacked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on national security and civil rights issues. For months, they have criticized him over a gun-trafficking investigation gone awry, with dozens of leaders calling for his resignation. Last week, more than 75 members of Congress co-sponsored a House resolution expressing “no confidence” in his leadership.

The intensifying heat on Mr. Holder comes as the Justice Departmentis stepping into some of the most politically divisive social issues of the day, including accusing an Arizona sheriff known for his crackdowns on illegal immigrants of racial profiling, scrutinizing new restrictions on voting in search of signs that they could lower turnout among minorities and telling judges that a law banning federal recognition of same-sex marriages is unconstitutional.

As Mr. Holder’s third year as attorney general draws to a close, no member of President Obama’s cabinet has drawn more partisan criticism. In an interview last week, Mr. Holder said he had no intention of resigning before the administration’s term was up, although he said he had made no decision about whether he would continue after 2012 should the president win re-election.

“I think that what I’m doing is right,” Mr. Holder said.“And election-year politics, which intensifies everything, is not going to drive me off that course.”

With F.B.I. agents standing guard outside his hotel room on Tuesday, Mr. Holder spoke hours before delivering a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library here that criticized the largely Republican-led efforts to put new restrictions on voting in the name of fighting fraud.

At that moment, protesters were rallying outside the library, some in support of stricter voter identification laws and others holding signs urging Mr. Holder to resign over the disputed gun-trafficking investigation, known as Operation Fast and Furious. Several dozen jeered when his motorcade arrived.

In the interview, Mr. Holder offered a glimpse of how he viewed the criticism. He said he thought some critics — like Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who favors allowing the military to handle terrorism suspects over the criminal justice system — are expressing “good faith” arguments about their policy disagreements.

But Mr. Holder contended that many of his other critics — not only elected Republicans but also a broader universe of conservative commentators and bloggers — were instead playing “Washington gotcha” games, portraying them as frequently “conflating things, conveniently leaving some stuff out, construing things to make it seem not quite what it was” to paint him and other department figures in the worst possible light.

Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

Mr. Holder, however, attributed most of the hostility to underlying ideological differences. “I think that people, despite my law enforcement background, view me as taking these consistently progressive stands, and I think that, philosophically, there is a desire to get at that person,” he said. “But I think the stands I have taken are totally consistent with a person who is looking at things realistically, factually.”

Bruce Buchanan, a professor of political science at the University of Texas, said Mr. Holder attracted “withering fire” from conservatives because “they sense he is vulnerable and because they perceive him as being a source of a lot of what irritates them about the way this administration does business.”

Photo

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. says he will not step down.Credit
Ben Sklar for The New York Times

That sentiment was on display at the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas declared, to applause, “If I’m the president of the United States and I find out there is an operation like Fast and Furious and my attorney general didn’t know about it, I would have him resign immediately.”

Fast and Furious was an operation in which agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, investigating an arms-trafficking network working for a Mexican drug cartel, sometimes did not move quickly to arrest low-level suspected “straw buyers” and seize their guns because the agents were seeking to build a bigger case. They lost track of hundreds of weapons; two guns linked to a suspect in the case were found near the site where a Border Patrol agent was killed.

Two Republicans, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Representative Darrell Issa of California, have led an inquiry into the operation. Mr. Holder has denounced the tactics used in the operation, known as “gunwalking,” but said he did not know about them or sanction their use.

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No documents or testimony have shown otherwise, but Republicans have pummeled him at oversight hearings and in news media appearances. Some accused him of perjury; others floated theories that the operation was intended to go bad so as to build a case for stronger gun-control laws and called the Holder Justice Department an accessory to murder.

In the interview, Mr. Holder said he viewed such attacks as “payback” for the way his predecessors in the Bush administration, John Ashcroft and Alberto R. Gonzales, were treated by their critics. Mr. Ashcroft was routinely criticized by Democrats as undermining civil liberties in the fight against terrorism and was mocked by liberals for covering up a Justice Department statue that has an exposed breast. Mr. Gonzales underwent heated oversight hearings about matters like the firing of a group of United States attorneys, and eventually resigned under pressure.

“They want to go after some high-level official in the administration,” Mr. Holder said.

Years ago, Mr. Holder added, the Justice Department was largely exempt from being used as political fodder. But he said that ever since the Clinton administration, a culture of “hyper-partisanship, questioning people’s motives and bald political attacks” has grown up around it, leaving that tradition “in tatters.”

Asked whether he conceded anything to his critics, Mr. Holder brought up a letter the department sent to Congress in February in response to early questions about Fast and Furious. It falsely assured lawmakers that agents always tried to interdict illegally purchased guns; the department recently withdrew it, saying its drafters had not known that the line was incorrect, because officials based in Arizona had said at the time that there had been no gunwalking in the case.

“I sincerely regret” the letter, Mr. Holder said, though he said he was not involved in writing it.

Despite his fraught political image, Mr. Holder has a low-key demeanor, allowing lawmakers to talk over him during hearings. Some colleagues, who say he can be similarly mild in internal administration debates, privately question whether he is tough enough to protect his and the department’s interests in rough-and-tumble bureaucratic or political fights. Others say the approach has helped him survive in his post despite relentless turbulence.

Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general under the first President George Bush, said he sometimes disagreed with Mr. Holder but considered him a friend. But he expressed concern about whether Mr. Holder sometimes allows himself to get steamrolled by his adversaries. “I have worried from time to time about Eric’s being seemingly rolled by the administration and his political opponents,” he said.

Mr. Holder announced in November 2009, for example, that several Guantánamo Bay detainees, accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, would be prosecuted in New York. Amid an uproar over security, the White House scrapped his plan and Congress blocked a civilian trial anywhere else.

He called that a “missed opportunity” and his biggest disappointment. “We would not have closed down Lower Manhattan, we’d be finished with that trial by now, and it could be something we could point to and show that we can be fair even to those we despise,” he said.

Hours after the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Holder delivered his voting-rights speech and then went to a reception also attended by several leaders of civil rights organizations. Outside, half a dozen protesters waited within shouting distance of his motorcade, and a phalanx of police officers waited to escort him to the airport. But as Mr. Holder lingered inside, the protesters eventually drifted away.

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Lightning Rod Undeterred by G.O.P. Thunder. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe